@R eview | STown

If you visit the website of the podcast STown, you’ll notice that the seven-part series is divided into “chapters.” After binge-listening seven hours during the past weekend (kept doing yard work so I could listen guilt-free), I agree that “chapters” is more appropriate than “episodes” as STown flows like a well-crafted story, masterfully told.

First a word of caution. If cussing (and I mean cussing, not cursing) offends you, please stop here and forget the podcast. Okay. You’ve been warned. STown stands for Shit Town, the name given to his hometown by John B. McLemore. The town he’s grown to hate is in Bibb County, Ala., about midway between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. John (or John B) is one of those people who has grown angry with the world, an iconoclast who can’t believe what idiots human beings have become. Unfortunately, he’s smart enough to know it’s true. He’s brilliant on a wide range of topics and is one of the world’s most talented restorers of antique mechanical clocks. But he’s also crazy as a loon and a world class cusser.

Oh, here’s another thing I should disclose (if you’re not one of the 12 regular readers of this blog who already knows), I’m a native of Alabama and have lived in the South all my life. I’ll admit, however, my experience in the South has been more suburban new South “Gardens & Guns” than rural town new South tattoos and Trump. But still, I’ve known a few John B’s in my life. They are unique and engaging while, simultaneously, scarey as hell.

Before sharing more about STown, here’s a flashback to my review of Serial, the podcast that shut down the tech-media “experts” who were writing podcasting’s obituary at the time:

Serial is like a brand new way to experience someone telling me a story that stretches 500 pages and a dozen hours. Except with Serial, “the audiobook” is presented in a way that no audio book I’ve ever experienced has (except, perhaps, the audiobook version of Katharine Graham’s autobiography). Rather than being a murder mystery, Serial is becoming a story about a journalist trying to determine the mystery of whether or not there is a story in the murder. It’s like an author of an audio book is writing the book in real time, sharing with us the pieces that have to come together and the frustrations when they don’t.

Like (I’m guessing) most people, I expected STown to be another Serial, a murder mystery documentary. Developed, written and narrated by a producer of This American Life, Brian Reed (a New Yorker, bless his heart), STown is, according to its digital equivalent of dust jacket notes, “about a man named John who despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it. John asks Brian to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, and the search for the truth leads to a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.”

The mysteries of STown do involve violence and crimes that are solved as dramatically as in any TV procedural. But STown is more southern gothic than journalist whodunit. It’s Faulkner* meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with a little Rick Bragg and Truman Capote thrown in.

It took three years to produce STown. And while it is “by” Reed, it’s obvious that countless talented people worked on this project.

Every moment spent during those three years is evident.

A hint: Listen through to the very end. It has one of the best-written final paragraphs of any book (er, podcast) I know.

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Launched in August, 2000, RexBlog.com is the personal blog of Rex Hammock, founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., a customer media and marketing services company founded in 1991 in Nashville. Rex is also founder/helper-in-chief of SmallBusiness.com.(...)